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Home , Adriana Asti, Claudia Cardinale, Enrico Medioli, Flic Story, Luchino Visconti, Mario Garbuglia

September 19, 2017 (XXXV:4) /ROCCO EI SUOI FRATELLI (1960), 177 min.

(The online version of this handout has color images.)

Golden Globes, 1961, Best Film and Best Director

Directed by Luchino Visconti Written by Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, (story); Suso Cecchi D'Amico, ,Massimo Franciosa, , Luchino Visconti (screenplay); Giovanni Testori (inspired by episodes in the novel Il ponte della Ghisolfa) Produced by Goffredo Lombardo Music Cinematography Film Editing Production Design

Cast Innocent). While he started as a director of plays and , …Rocco Parondi pursuits he would continue into his career, his entrée into film …Simone Parondi was working as an assistant director to , to whom he …Nadia was introduced by mutual friend . After the war, Katina Paxinou…Rosaria Parondi Visconti established himself as an innovative director for the …Ciro's fiancée stage, on one occasion having Salvador Dali design his sets for Spiros Focás…Vincenzo Parondi (as Spiros Focas) As You Like It. His film career was almost cut short in the Max Cartier…Ciro Parondi when (1943), based on James M. Cain's The Postman Corrado Pani…Ivo Always Rings Twice, engendered the ire of 's Rocco Vidolazzi…Luca Parondi censors. Visconti was thrown in jail and he was to be executed, …Laundry Worker only surviving because of the timely arrival of American troops. …Laundry Worker Ossessione was later hailed as an early example of Italian neo- Enzo Fiermonte…Boxer . Rocco and his Brothers may be Visconti’s most …Nino Rossi accessible and influential film: it’s impossible not to notice the Rosario Borelli…Un biscazziere similarities in Coppola’s Godfather films and Scorsese‘s Raging Renato Terra…Alfredo, Ginetta's brother Bull (1987), in particular. He wrote the screenplays or full stories …Morini for almost all of his 20 directorial projects which include …Cerri L'innocente (1976), Conversation Piece (1974), Ludwig (1973), …Luisa Death in (1969, screenplay), Alla ricerca di Tadzio (1970, …Ginetta TV Short documentary), The Damned (1969), The Stranger (1967), The Witches (segment “La Strega bruciata viva”), Sandra Luchino Visconti (b. November 2, 1906 in , Lombardy, (1965), (1963), Boccaccio ‘70 (segment “Il Italy—d. March 17, 1976, age 69, in , Lazio, Italy) was lavoro”), Le Notti Bianche (1957), Senso (1954), We, the Women born into one of Northern Italy's richest families as one of the (1953, segment “”), Appunti su un fatto di Duke of Modrone's seven children. He was friends with opera cronaca (1953, Documentary short), Bellissima (1951), La Terra composer Puccini, conductor Toscanini, and writer Gabriele Trema (1948), Days of Glory (1945, Documentary) and D’Annunzio (who would write Visconti’s last film, The Ossessione (1943). Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—2

Nino Rota (b. Giovanni “Nino” Rota on December 3, 1911 in light, and I cannot stop. When I was shooting with Fellini, I was Milan, Lombardy, Italy—d. April 10, 1979, age 67, in Rome, always lighting the next shot, because I was afraid to lose the Lazio, Italy) was born into a family of musicians. Considered a idea of the light.” child prodigy, by the time he was a teenager Rota was a well- known composer and orchestra conductor. His first oratorio, Alain Delon (b. November 8, 1935 in Sceaux, Seine [now Hauts- “L'infanzia di San Giovanni Battista,” was performed in Milan de-Seine], Île-de-, France) is often called the French and as early as 1923 and his lyrical comedy, “Il Principe James Dean. While some may argue that this title is more Porcaro,” was composed in 1926. He briefly moved to the United appropriate for “cool” Breathless star Jean-Paul Belmondo, States to study under Fritz Reiner before returning to Italy to Delon’s brooding characters gave him an instant sexual appeal. teach. In 1937, he began a teaching career that led to the In addition, both actors famously refused to learn English, directorship of the Bari Conservatory, a thereby limiting their roles in title he held from 1950 until his death in Hollywood. Film scholar David 1979. Throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s, Thomson once describe Delon as “so Rota he branched into opera and by the earnest and immaculate as to be thought ‘60s he was scoring ballets. His work in lethal or potent. He was also close to the film dates to the early forties and the real French underworld. Delon is not so composer was known for the volume of much a good actor as an astonishing his output in a short amount of time. presence.” Initially, the French Averaging around 3 film scores per year, heartthrob wanted to be a butcher, like Rota is also said to have worked most his father. However, he mischievous ferociously in the period of 1949-54, nature often got the better of him and as where he would produce close to 10 film a child he was expelled six times from scores per year. His is most well-known different schools. Eventually, Delon movie scores are for Fellini’s films from enlisted as a soldier in the French army The White Sheik (1952) to Orchestra and served in in the war of Indochina, Rehearsal (1978), and especially the where he spent 11 months in prison, 1963 classic 8½. While latter film may appear to be in disorder, giving credence to the darkness exhibited by many of his Rota’s tracks helped synchronize the entire production. Other characters. Delon garnered his first Golden Globe nomination for directors the composer worked for include , his turn as the headstrong nephew of Italian prince Burt Luchino Visconti, , , and Lancaster in Visconti’s celebrated The Leopard (1963), which . Rota’s score for the The Godfather (1973) increased Delon’s international visibility, leading to offers from earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, a Hollywood. Save for the gritty neo-noir Once a Thief (1965), his prize he would win for his score in The Godfather: Part II Hollywood efforts were largely glossy, empty affairs like the all- (1974). He also composed the music for many theatre star Yellow Rolls-Royce (1965) and the truly dreadful Western productions by Visconti, Zefirelli, and de Filippo. comedy Texas Across the River (1966) with Dean Martin and Joey Bishop. He returned to France the following year to appear Giuseppe Rotunno (b. March 19, 1923 in Rome, Lazio, Italy) in his iconic role as an icy, meticulous hit man in Jean-Pierre has worked with some of the greatest names of the golden age of Melville’s New Wave cult favorite Le Samourai (1967). His Italian cinema, including , , and carefully controlled performance as a moody loner who lived and . Originally a still photographer, his entry into died by a strict code of personal conduct would come to film was operating the camera for legendary cinematographer dominate his screen persona, and Delon would play variations on G.R. Aldo. In 1955, Rotunno became a full-fledged lighting the role in subsequent films like Le Motocyclette (1968), which director and due to his versatility, became one of the most in- increased his standing among both French and international demand cinematographers. His work ranges from the epic, audiences. In 1969, Delon’s ascent to fame was severely operatic compositions of Visconti's The Leopard (1963) to the threatened by a scandal involving the murder of his former daguerreotype-influenced style of Monicelli's bodyguard, Stefan Markovic. Investigations into the killing (1963). He has shot several of Fellini’s films as well as Mike unearthed links between the actor and numerous members of the Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (1971), ’s All That Jazz European underworld, as well as scandalous connections to (1979) and Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron political figures. Delon was repeatedly held for questioning, but Munchausen (1989). Tonight’s film was shot with three cameras was eventually acquitted. However, many industry figures simultaneously, which Rotunno remembers, “For Visconti, this believed that his association with Markovic would ruin his system was ideal. But it was horribly complicated for me because career. To the surprise of many, Delon became even more there wasn't enough space on the set for the lights.” Speaking in popular with French moviegoers, who felt that his connections to an interview, the cinematographer points out that just as music criminal elements lent a note of veritas to his numerous gangster has only seven basic notes, cinematography has only three lights: roles. He quickly capitalized on the notoriety by starring in a “You've got the key light, fill light, and back light, out of which string of popular crime films, including The Sicilian Clan (1969) comes an infinity of results. The light is like a kaleidoscope, but and Borsolino (1970), which finally teamed him with Belmondo. those three lights mixed together are more touchy than the Delon then gave a critically acclaimed turn in Volker kaleidoscope. It's difficult to ask a painter, ‘How did you paint Schlondorffâ’s Swann in Love (1982) and finally earned a César the picture?’ I go with my eyes and intuition. I like so much to for Notre Histoire (1984). The actor was not present at the Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—3 awards ceremony and the presenter Coluche accepted the award short hair, and a warm deep voice was able to create an erotic on his behalf—which he kept. After the presenter's death in charge when needed. Ironically, following her screen debut in 1986, the César was nowhere to be found. To this day, Delon still 1956, and after nine French films in four years, she came to does not have this award. These triumphs were compounded by international prominence when her voice was dubbed into Italian the blockbuster hit Parole de flic (1985), an action-packed crime in Rocco and His Brothers. Girardot also appeared in two picture that featured the 50-year-old Delon performing his own Visconti stage productions in Paris: William Gibson’s Two for stunts. But advancing age, as well as the expensive failure of The the Seesaw (1958), opposite , and Arthur Miller's Passage (1986), forced Delon to consider his future projects with After the Fall (1964). Her biggest success came in Docteur greaer care. Ever the shrewed opportunist, he created a popular Françoise Gailland (1975), for which she won the first of her line of products that bore his name from perfume and cigarettes three Césars (the French equivalent of the Oscar). The other two to sunglasses that became the epitome of cinematic cool after were for supporting roles in Lelouch’s Les Misérables (1995), as Chow Yun-fat wore a pair in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow a crude farmer's wife, and as ’s demanding (1986). Between 1991 and 1995, he also reaped numerous honors mother in Michael Haneke's perverse La Pianiste (2001). In for his lifetime of film work, including an Honorary 2005, Haneke cast her again in a short but key role in the in 1991 from the 45th Berlin International intriguing Caché (2005) as Daniel Auteuil's Film Festival, as well knighthood from the bed-ridden but sharp-witted mother. Legion of Honor that same year. In 1995, Although she made fewer films later in life, he was made an Officer of the National Girardot retained her status as a star on the Order of Merit, while in 2005, his level of Montand, Delon and Jean-Paul knighthood was promoted to the next Belmondo. Some of her other fils highest class, that of Officer. Madonna's Préférence (1998), Alibi perfetto (1992), The song “Beautiful Killer” on her MDNA Legendary Life of Ernest Hemingway album is a tribute to Alain Delon. (1988), Le Dernier baiser (1977), Traitement de choc/Doctor in the Nude Renato Salvatori (b. March 20, 1933 in (1973), Storia di una donna (1970), Seravezza, Tuscany, Italy—d. March 27, Erotissimo (1968), L’Autre femme (1963), 1988 (age 55) in Rome, Lazio, Italy) came La Vice et la vertu (1962), Maigret tend un to acting by chance, when he was picked pige (1958) and Thirteen at the Table for his athletic good looks while working at (1956). a resort in Viareggio. After a few roles as a juvenile, Salvatori graduated in the to working with the powerful likes of Katina Paxinou (b. December 17, 1900, Piraeus, Athens, directors Luchino Visconti, , and Vittorio De Greece—d. February 22, 1973, Athens, Greece) first appeared on Sica. While he has a vicious relationship with Annie Girardot’s stage in 1928, in an Athens production of Henry Bataille’s “La character in tonight’s film, the two actually fell in love on set and femme nue”. By the early 1930’s she was one of the founding were married shortly after the film debuted. Salvatori made his members of the National Theatre of Greece and performed final film in 1981, The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, before several major roles in Sophocles’ Electra and Henrik Ibsen’s dying of cirrhosis of the liver in 1988. He starred in 71 films, a Ghosts, often co-starring with her husband, Alexis Minotis. After selection of which are Tragedy of A Ridiculous Man (1982), Asso the outbreak of World War II, she left Europe for America where (1980), Oggetti Smarriti (1980), Luna (1979), Armaguedon she was offered her first film role in 1943 in For Whom the Bell (1977), Uomini si nasce poliziotti si muore (1976), The Context Tolls (1943). For her superb portrayal of the Spanish (1976) as Police Inspector--Rogas'S Friend, The Last Woman revolutionary Pilar in this classic film adaptation of Ernest (1976), Flic Story (1975), Il Sospetto (1975), Le Gitan (1975), Hemingway’s novel, she won a Best Supporting Actress Rendezvous De La Mort Joyeuse (1973), Una Breve Vacanza Academy Award and a Golden Globe in 1944. She was then in (1973), Les Granges Brulees (1973), La Prima Notte di Quiete consideration for the role of Mama Hanson in I Remember Mama (1972), State of Siege (1972), The Light at the Edge of the World (1948), but the role went to Irene Dunne, received a Best Actress (1971),Burn! (1970), Z (1969), Three Nights of Love (1969), Oscar nomination for her performance. She made a few more How To Seduce a Playboy (1968), Of Flesh and Blood (1964), Hollywood movies, before returning to Greece in the early The Organizer (1964), Two Are Guilty (1964), Disorder (1964), and resuming her work in the theater. Some of her other film Fiasco in Milan (1963), (1961), ... And the Wild, work includes The Martlet’s Tale (1970), Tante Zita (1968), The Wild Women (1961), I magliari (1959) and Big Deal On Trial (196, scenes deleted), Morte di un bandito (1961), The Madonna Street (1958). Miracle (1959), Mr. Arkadin (1955), Prince of Foxes (1949), The Inheritance (1951), Confidential Agent (1945) and Hostages Annie Girardot (b. October 25, 1931, Paris—d. February 28, (1943). 2011, age 79, in Paris, France) was an extremely versatile performer whose distinguished career stretched from popular Claudia Cardinale (b. April 15, 1938 in , French comedies and melodramas to the French New Wave. Jean Protectorate, Tunisia) was 17 years old and studying in Rome Cocteau called her “the finest dramatic temperament of the when she entered a beauty contest, which resulted in her getting a postwar period.” Hardly ever considered a sex goddess like her succession of small film roles. The same year she had a child out near contemporaries and , the of wedlock, however ,she had just signed a contract forbidding petite Girardot, with her strongly etched features, often set off by her to cut her hair, marry or gain weight. Because of this, she told Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—4 everyone that her newborn son was her baby brother. She did not Visconti’s share of the Erba fortune ensued. She eventually reveal to the child that he was her son until he was 19 years old. regained her property but lived thereafter in retirement, the Tonight was one of her early roles, but it was in Careless (1962) children staying sometimes with her, sometimes with their father. that she rose to the front ranks of Italian cinema with her beauty, As a youth Visconti was restless and discontented. He dark flashing eyes and explosive sexuality. Cardinale then ran away repeatedly from home, and once from a college in became an international star in Federico Fellini's classic 8½ Geneva. Hoping that military discipline might bring him under (1963) with and only increased her appeal control, his father sent him to the cavalry school at Pinerolo, in ’s epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). where he conceived a passion for horses. Though known for her bombshell characters, Cardinale won two For some ten years after that the breeding of racehorses awards from the : a Career in was Visconti’s principal interest—he often remarked on the 1993 and the Pasinetti Award in 1984 for Best Actress for similarity between the problems involved in schooling horses and Claretta (1984). She has acted in 117 films and TV shows, directing actors (and said that horses were on the whole among them, All Roads Lead to Rome (2015), Twice Upon a preferable because they didn’t talk). During this period Visconti Time in the West (2015), A View of Love (2010), Brigands dabbled in the arts but remained uncertain of his direction. He (1999), Son of the (1993), A Man in Love (1987), painted, designed sets for one or two plays, and tried his hand as (1982), La pelle (1981), Corleone (1978), Blonde in a film scenarist. He was nearly thirty when in 1936 he left Italy Black Leather (1975), The Red Tent (1969), The Conspirators with the intention of working for the cinema in England or (1969), A Fine Pair (1968), The Hell with Heroes (1968), Mafia France. The same year, having been introduced by Coco Chanel (1968), Don't Make Waves (1967), The Professionals (1966), to Jean Renoir at a racetrack, he found himself on the great (1966), (1963), The Leopard French director’s production team. (1963), The Battle of Austerlitz (1960), The Magistrate (1959), At first in charge of costumes, Visconti then served as Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) and Goha (1958). Renoir’s third assistant director on Une Partie de Campagne (1936) and Les Bas Fonds (1937). Escaping in this way from the claustrophobia of Italy, home, and Fascism, and finding himself accepted by a group of dedicated and talented artists in the heady atmosphere of the Popular Front, permanently changed Visconti’s life. Of Renoir himself he said: “His was a human influence, not a professional one. To be with Renoir, to listen to him, that opened my mind.” After a brief, disillusioning visit to Hollywood in 1937, Visconti went home. In 1940 he was able to work once more with Renoir, who had gone to Italy to film an adaptation of La Tosca. Renoir had to abandon the movie when Italy declared war on France and it was completed by Charles Koch. Visconti himself remained in Italy, where he joined the editorial staff of the magazine Cinema. The young critics and filmmakers associated with Cinema were in vigorous revolt against the from World Film Directors V. 1, Ed John Wakeman, insipidity and conformism of the contemporary Italian film H.W.Wilson Co. , NY, 1987 industry. Their aim was to make cinema an extension of the literary realism that had developed in Italy at the end of the Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone was born in Milan, nineteenth century, notably in the work of the Sicilian novelist Italy, the third son of Giuseppe Visconti and the former Carla . Erba. His mother was the daughter of a millionaire industrialist Visconti’s first film was Ossessione (Obsession, 1942), and his father was the son of the Duke of Modrone. His father’s based on James M. Cain’s starkly naturalistic thriller The family, wealthy landowners, had received their dukedom from Postman Always Rings Twice, with the action translated from Napoleon. They trace their ancestry to the Visconti who ruled America to the Romagna region of Italy. Visconti had been Milan from 1277 to 1447, and on back to Desiderius, father-in- looking for a subject which would not invite the hostility of the law of Charlemagne. Fascist censors, and the Cain novel had been suggested to him by With his six brothers and sisters, Luchino Visconti grew Renoir (whose stylistic influence can be detected in this but in up in his father’s palazzo in Milan. His education was supervised none of Visconti’s later films). Ossessione is about the by his mother. She was a talented musician and he first envisaged destructive passion that develops between Giovanna, wife of an a musical career also, studying the cello for ten years in aging innkeeper, and Gino, a young wanderer who takes a casual childhood and adolescence His delight in the theatre and opera job at the inn. Gino begins to suspect that he has been used and also developed in childhood, inspired by the plays and goes to another woman, a young dancer with whom his entertainments his father liked to arrange in the palazzo’s private relationship is purely physical, uncomplicated by financial greed theatre. From the age of seven, he attended performances at La or sexual politics. But the police are closing in, and Gino and Scala opera house in Milan, which his grandfather and then his Giovanna, reconciled, die together as they try to escape arrest. uncle had helped to support. Although Visconti usually described Several members of the Cinema group had a hand in the his childhood as idyllic, there was discord between his parents. In script of Ossessione, which thus became a kind of manifesto. At 1921 they separated for good, and a bitter court battle over Carla its first showing in Rome in 1942 it had an effect that was Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—5 described as “explosive.” Appearing at a time when the Italian against the wholesalers, and when, at the end, he recognizes the cinema was devoted to optimistic trivia, Ossessione’s social and need for concerted rather than individual action against psychological authenticity and sexual frankness outraged the exploitation/ Church and the Fascist censors, and terrified the commercial is performed entirely by the people of distributors. When the censors tried to ban it, Visconti and his the village of Aci-Trezza, who contributed in important ways to friends appealed to Mussolini himself, who passed it with only a Visconti’s scenario and who say what they have to say in their few cuts. In the confusion following the own dialect (which is so obscure that it was Allied invasion, the film was destroyed. necessary to overlay the dialogue with a Visconti managed to preserve a commentary in standard Italian.). There is an duplicate, however, and a somewhat elemental quality in the film that has mutilated version of Ossessione was reminded critics of Flaherty and Eisenstein. It finally released some years after the war. has occasional longeurs, and purists have It was almost universally hailed as the complained of certain hauntingly beautiful first masterpiece of . shots whose only function is aesthetic. Pierre Leprohon has called it “a great Nevertheless, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has film, the portrait of a miserable, greedy, said, “the chiseled beauty of its images, the sensual, obstinate race at grips with the simplicity and rigour of its narrative, and its daily struggle for existence and with unbending concern with social realities have instincts they are unable to master. For all cause La terra trema to be hailed as a over and above the neorealism, this film masterpiece of the propaganda film.” It has the ingredient indispensable for its received first prize at the Venice Film lasting greatness, poetry.” Festival in 1948. It was nevertheless not popular with audiences For a time during the war, Visconti was imprisoned by used to lighter fare, was not widely distributed, and is said to the Fascist authorities, charged with aiding the Resistance. have cost Visconti almost $200,000 of his own money. Moved from jail to jail and threatened with shooting, he was only For some years after that Visconti restricted his reprieved by the Allied invasion. After the liberation of Rome, he activities to the theatre, presenting among other things a number filmed the trial and execution of several Fascist officials, of innovatory interpretations of the classics like his celebrated including his jailer, and the death of another at the hands of an 1948 production of As You Like It (with additional scenery and angry mob; these sequences appear in Giorni di Gloria (Days of costumes by Salvador Dali), and an equally famous version of Glory, 1945), a documentary produced by the Allies. ’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore produced in Paris in 1951. In 1945 Visconti began another and immensely The excessive visual effects and self-indulgent coups de théatre successful and influential career as a theatre director. No one did that had marred some of his earlier productions gave way to a more to free the Italian stage from outworn conventions, more purposive and disciplined use of all the resources of the techniques, and attitudes or to modernize its repertoire, to which theatre, but he never lost his love of spectacle or his meticulous he added the works of such contemporary French and American concern for realistic detail (luxuries that he was prepared to pay writers as Sartre, Cocteau, Anouilh, Arthur Miller, Tennessee for himself if necessary). Williams, Hemingway and Erskine Caldwell. Visconti built up a The same qualities distinguished his operatic repertory company which later provided acting and technical productions, which were often lavishly staged, but in which his talent for his films, and whose best-known products are the actor singers were required to curb the traditional extravagance of Marcello Mastroianni and the director Franco Zeffirelli. operatic gesture and to “act like people.” Many considered There were no professional actors at all in Visconti’s Visconti the greatest operatic director of his day, especially in a next film, however. Visconti was a Marxist, though an triumphant series of productions with . “The real unorthodox one, much influenced by the Italian socialist leader reason I have done opera,” he once asserted, “is the particular and theorist Antonio Gramsci. In 1947 he went to with opportunity of working with Mme. Callas, who is such a great some funds advanced by the Communist Party, intending to artist.” His were produced not only at and make a short documentary. What he saw there inspired a far elsewhere in Italy but at Covent Garden in London (where he more ambitious project—a vast fresco of the Sicilian poor, in staged an un forgettable production of Verdi’s in three parts dealing respectively with the fishermen, the peasants, 1958) and in other foreign countries. In 1958 he helped Gian- and the sulfur miners. In the event, only one part was Carlo Menotti to launch the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, for completed—La terra trema: Episodio del mare. which he directed a number of operas over the years. The film is loosely based on Verga’s novel I Meanwhile Visconti had made his third film, Bellisima malavoglia, but in Visconti’s Marxist adaptation the great enemy (The Most Beautiful, 1951), starring Anna Magnani as a of the poor Sicilian fishermen is not the sea but the local working-class woman befuddled by the movies. She enters her wholesalers, who own the boats and pay the fishermen derisory small daughter in a competition to find “the prettiest child in prices for what they catch. One family, the Valastro, try to free Rome,” who will star in a new film. themselves from this pernicious system. They mortgage their The child eventually wins the competition, but by that time her house and buy their own boat, but are ruined when it is destroyed mother has seen something of the ruthless commercialism of the in a storm. The film centers around two key episodes in the movie industry; she rejects the preferred contract and is restored development of the political consciousness of the young ‘Ntoni to her long-suffering husband. The director himself collaborated Valastro—when he leads a spontaneous if short-lived revolt on the script, as he always did, along with Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—6 who was thereafter his principal writer, and Frances Rosi, bridge—which is also a bridge between memory and actuality, himself now an important director. Bellisima, the first of illusion and reality—she meets one evening a man (Marcello Visconti’s films to be released in the United States, is an amiable Mastroianni) who is as lonely as herself, an exile in the city. He satire on the petty greeds and snobberies of Italian society and on falls in love with her, but loses her when her half-imaginary lover the parasitic nature of the cinema. It is all the same a minor work quite unexpectedly returns, in the Visconti canon, and an atypical one. For the first time Visconti filmed entirely in the studio It was followed by Senso (Feeling, 1954), widely regarded as with constructed sets, deliberately achieving a stylized and one of his greatest films. Set in the Risorgimento of the mid- theatrical atmosphere that is intensified by grainy photography in 1860s, it opens with a brilliant scene in a Venetian theatre where soft definition, reminiscent of the “poetic realism” of Marcel a performance of Verdi’s Carné. The result was admired at the Venice disintegrates into an Italian nationalist Film Festival, but at the time of its release demonstration against occupying received generally tepid reviews. The Austrian forces. The story (from a adherents of neorealism indeed greeted it novella by ) turns on the with considerable hostility, as a further step love affair that develops between an away from the naturalism of Visconti’s early Italian countess—a nationalist, played films—a kind of betrayal. Most critics now by —and a young Austrian regard it as a work of great charm but no officer () for whom she particular significance, though it has been betrays her husband, her brother, and claimed as an influence o the films of her political allegiance. This personal and Resnais. drama resembles that of Ossessione, not least in the way that Visconti’s retreat from naturalism was reversed in his emotional responses and moral standards are shown to be next film, Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). influenced by class and historical factors—notably in the It may be seen almost as a continuation of Le terra trema, complex characterization of the Austrian officer Franz. As examining the fate of the widowed Rosaria Pafundi and her five Geoffrey Nowell-Smith points out there is, moreover, “an sons, a peasant family from the impoverished south trying to implicit parallel between the events of 1866 and those of 1934- make a new life in the northern industrial city of Milan. Each 1945. In each case, one élite replaced another, and the new élite brother in effect illustrates a different approach to the problems came to look suspiciously similar to the old.” they all face: one opts for unobtrusive integration, another (the It has often been pointed out that Visconti brought to the saintlike Rocco) clings loyally but hopelessly to the traditional theatre the skills of a film director, and to the cinema those of a peasant values, and one decisively rejects them. Widely regarded stage (and especially operatic) director. From the beginning his as a requiem for these virtues, the film was actually intended to films were in some respect operatic in form, made up of scenes convey something very different—a recognition that the old involving two or at most three people, with occasional values, and the traditional Italian family in which they are interventions by larger groups having the function of a chorus. embodied, must be modified if society is ever to become less This is partly true of Senso, which actually begins with an confining and unjust. When Ciro denounces his brother Simone operatic performance, and whose plot would look perfectly at to the police—for a murder committed in the name of “honor”— home in a romantic opera (though in fact it escapes melodrama he is freeing himself from the bonds of the past. If the film because of the subtlety of its characterization). Senso is operatic confused its critics it is because of something ambivalent in also in the opulence of its technique. It was the first of Visconti’s own view of the world—its persistent opposition of Visconti’s films in color, which he used with absolute mastery, what Geoffrey Nowell-Smith calls “two conflicting ideals, one making Senso, as Pierre Leprophon says, “a landmark as rooted emotionally in the past, and the other projected important in its day as Renoir’s Carrosse d’or.” intellectually into the future.” Visconti used three different cameramen to achieve the Like most of Visconti’s movies, Rocco and His effects he sought at different point in the film—effects that were Brothers changed considerably in the course of its filming. often derived from various styles of nineteenth-century Venetian Although the nucleus of the story was original, the script painting. Admired as it was and is by the critics, Senso was incorporates material from the Milanese stories of Giovanni nevertheless a failure commercially. A dubbed and shortened Testori, and from Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, and Verga; a version was shown in Britain as The Wanton Countess, with number of scriptwriters were called in at different stages. The English dialogue by and Paul Bowles. distinguished international cast included Katina Paximou, Alain With a growing reputation for extravagance in Delon, Claudia Cardinale, and Annie Girardot. production and failure at the box-office, Visconti was unable to Rocco and His Brothers was the first of Visconti’s films find producers. In an effort to vindicate himself, he shot the next to gain worldwide distribution and not to lose money. It won a film in seven weeks, with a relatively small budget provided by special jury prize at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and several himself and some wealthy friends. This was Le notti bianchi other international awards. Though the version seen in the United (White Nights, 1957), adapted from Dostoevsky’s short story. States was damaged by extensive cuts, it was warmly received by Natalia (played by Maria Schell) lives with her blind most American critics. One in Newsweek found it “a moving grandmother. Their mysterious lodger, whom she loves, has left humanitarian report” comparable to John Ford’s The Grapes of them, promising to return. Every evening she awaits his return on Wrath, with a “persistent reality that finally drowns out the a bridge over the canal that separates her dreamy private world movie’s faults.” from the vital, noisy, transient life of the big city. On this This success made possible Visconti’s ambitious screen Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—7 version of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel Il gattopardo (The her American husband drive from Geneva to the ancient hill- Leopard, 1963). A return to the risorgimento, it is a study of an town of Volterra—a journey into the past. They are to attend a ancient family of Sicilian aristocrats at a time of rapid social ceremony in which the garden of Sandra’s family home is to be change. This theme, and the fact that Visconti undertook it with a opened as a public park in memory of her Jewish father, who multi-million dollar budget provided by 20th Century-Fox, using died in Auschwitz. Enigmatic incidents begin to point to two a wide screen and Technicolor, greatly disquieted the nostalgics dark possibilities—that an incestuous relationship had existed of neorealism. In fact, Visconti recreates the story in his own between Sandra and Gianni, and that their mother (now insane) way. Where the Prince of Lampedusa accounts for the survival of had betrayed their father to the Nazis. At the end of the film the House of Salina in almost mystical terms, the “Red Duke” Gianni is dead by suicide, and Sandra, her ghosts exorcized, has Visconti attributes it to political and economic cunning—as achieved a dubious liberation. Inspired partly by the Oresteia of another example of the way the old order perpetuates itself in the Aeschylus, the theme of the transmission across the generations face of revolutionary ferment. He shows the old Prince (played of a family curse becomes in Visconti’s hands a historical and by ) coming to terms with the changing social existential phenomenon. The film won the major award, the order. Over the timid objections of Golden Lion, at the Venice Film Festival the family priest, the Prince gives his in 1965, and seemed at least to one critic blessing and a bag of gold to his Visconti’s greatest single work. But nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), off many reviewers, struck as they were by to join Garibaldi’s forces, and upon the film’s brooding atmosphere, its Tancredi’s return, arranges a striking visual contrasts of light and marriage between this fiery young shade, remained more puzzled than opportunist and the beautiful Angela impressed. (Claudia Cardinale), daughter of a Le straniero (The Stranger, rich bourgeois. In the brilliant and 1967), Visconti’s rather flat-footed immensely long ball scene at the end, attempt to film Camus’ L’Étranger, was the alliance between aristocrats and followed by La caduta degli Dei (The parvenus is sealed, amid rumors of Damned, 1969), a baroque and intricately reprisals against Garibaldi’s peasant followers and intimations of plotted study, through the microcosm of a family of German the old Prince’s mortality. Politically the film is highly steel barons, of the conditions that gave rise to Nazism in ambiguous. The stratagems by which the privileged class will Germany, John Coleman thought it “surely the worst Visconti survive are set forth with unsparing realism, but as we see yet, a great wallow in décor and decadence,” while Geoffrey through the Prince’s eyes what endures and what is lost of the Nowell-Smith called it “a confident if not entirely successful, past, the dominant note is unmistakably one of nostalgia. return to the operatic-melodramatic mode” of Senso. It seemed to The film won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film the latter critic that Visconti was becoming less and less a critic Festival and had splendid reception in Italy and elsewhere in of society as his interest shifted from history to culture, and Europe. The version shown in the United States, however, was Howell-Smith dealt dismissively with Morte a Venezia (Death in shorn of several important scenes, badly printed on inferior color Venice) which followed in 1971. stock, and insensitively dubbed. Visconti, denying paternity of In the novella by Thomas Mann on which the film is this version, remarked: “It is our destiny to be always in the based, Gustav von Aschenbach is a great writer whose work and hands of assassins….We work for months and months to create life alike have celebrated the classical virtues of order, restraint, material that is then torn to shreds by ravening dogs.” Even thus and discipline. On a vacation in Venice he encounters a Polish mutilated, the film seemed to David Robinson “a beautiful and youth, Tadzio. They never so much as speak to one another but fascinating spectacle….The mise-en-scène is superb. Each scene the boy’s beauty—itself the embodiment of a Platonic ideal— is staged with the rhythm of a choreographer and the composition unlocks the ecstatic and Dionysian part of Aschenbach’s nature, of a painter” and “it is a film of enormous virtuosity and brio.” so long denied. The moral certainties of a lifetime are swept Robinson’s mot serious complaint as that he would have away in an anguished discovery of the terrible powers of chaos expected deeper social and psychological perceptions from and unreason. Mann based Aschenbach on Gustav Mahler; in Visconti, who “apart from anything else, reflects the central Visconti’s film he is presented as a composer rather than a writer, historical situation of Il gattopardo in his own life.” In 1983, a and Mahler’s music fills the soundtrack. Visconti said: “I think new print of The Leopard dubbed in Italian with English subtitles of Death in Venice as essentially the search by an artist for and longer by twenty-five minutes, was released in the United perfection in art and the impossibility of achieving it. When he States and Britain to general acclaim. “The appearance of this achieves it, that’s death. There is a second theme: the dualism enchanting work,” wrote, “proves that two between respectability and the corruption within the artist—the decades make no difference whatsoever, but twenty-five minutes seeds of genius and self-destruction….The boy [is] a sort of can transform a very good film into a possibly great one….The angel of destiny, a fatal presence, he knows, instinctively, that he replaced footage now reveals the shapeliness and elegance of the will lead Aschenbach to his death.” are equally authentic and movie Visconti conceived, which is more about the inevitability correctly franked for that time and place. Dork Bogarde, who of change than about the specific nature of those changes.” plays Aschenbach, said of Visconti: “He concentrates every Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (1965), shown in the Unites second, oh, Christ, every split second. You’re supposed to do States as Sandra and in Britain as Of a Thousand Delights is one your job perfectly , because he does his perfectly.” Whether in of the most complex and difficult of Visconti’s films, Sandra and this instance Visconti had done his job perfectly is a matter of Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—8 opinion. No one denied that it was a film of great visual beauty first thrust him into prominence. His early films are now classics, and power, brilliantly capturing the diseased beauty of the and each new film he makes is an eagerly awaited cultural event. ancient city in which it is set. Jan Dawson noted that “the social [Written in 1967] And yet he has remained obstinately nuances and sartorial niceties of life in an expensive hotel are impervious to changes in intellectual fashions. A lonely and lovingly observed, the self-conscious nonchalance of the guests unassailable giant, his work has a devious consistency paralleled, minutely choreographed.” Georges Sadoul called it on the world scale, only by and Orson Welles…. “unquestionably [Visconti’s] most perfect film…a richly textured, obsessional study of passion and social putrefaction,” and at the it received the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Prize and the Golden Globe. For many critics, however, it was a vulgarization of Mann’s story. Jan Dawson thought it “only a pathetic self-discovery of an elderly closet queen,” and David Thomson called it “a disguised weepie, its surface a stcky crust, covering nothing.” Soon after completing Death in Venice Visconti collapsed with “nicotine poisoning.” He never fully recovered his health but continued to work, making three more films. Ludwig (1973), about the mad king of nineteenth-century Bavaria, seemed to Stanley Kauffman “as mad as its subject—in every way but one. It is gorgeous.” Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece,1974) stars Burt Lancaster as an old professor whose home is invaded by a rich, vulgar and imperious countess and her retinue; it was warmly received in Paris but hissed at the New York Film Festival in 1975. L’innocente (The Rocco and His Brothers Innocent, 1976) has as a heroic D’Annunzian There is a strange, rather unrealistic scene in La terra hedonist who murders his wife’s illegitimate baby in the interests trema where a man arrives in the village, wanders around talking of uxorious delight and, finding this gesture unappreciated kills to people, and then leaves in a boat taking with him a group of himself. Directed from a wheelchair this “ravishingly elegant young men, destination uncertain. Among these young men is movie” was Visconti’s last. He was editing it when he died in his Cola Valastro. Before leaving he has a conversation with his sumptuous Roman villa of influenza and heart disease. brother ‘Ntoni which, according to Visconti, was improvised on Luchino Visconti was a stocky, elegant man, deep- the spot, and in which the narrow geographical frontiers of the voiced, dark-eyed, with heavy eyebrows and the prominent nose fisherman’s world are clearly affirmed. Cola is embarking for the of his great ancestors. He was said to be liable to sky-rending North ‘al continente’, symbolized by Naples, the Ultima Thule of rages” on set but in conversation was a person of “totally the fisherman’s vision This scene, though it fits uneasily into the disarming courtesy and sly, laconic wit.” Often accused of tight structure of La terra trema, was soon vindicated ‘voting Left and living Right,’ he remained a communist all his historically. In the boom years of the 1950s and early 1960s ever life, though he would not join the party. He was also a Christian, increasing numbers of men and families began to emigrate from though often anticlerical. As a young man, he said: ‘I was stagnant rural areas in the South towards the expanding industrial impelled toward the cinema, by, above all, the need to tell stories centres of Northern Italy. Despised (as savages) and distrusted of people who were alive, of people living amid things and not of (as black labour) by the Northerners, ignorant of the world of the the things themselves. The cinema that interests me is an golden cities for which they were heading, they ended up for the anthropomorphic cinema. The most humble gestures of man, his most part as an insecure, disillusioned, ghetto-loving sub- bearing, his feelings and instincts, are enough to make the things proletariat on the fringes of the great industrial complexes. It is that surround him poetic and alive. . . .And [his] momentary their problem, and that of the society to which they have to adapt, absence from the luminous rectangle gives to everything an that provides the starting-point for Rocco and His Brothers. appearance of still life [natura morta].” Rocco and His Brothers was made in 1959, immediately after the radical aesthetic experiment of White Nights, and is a From Luchino Visconti, 3rd edition. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. deliberate step backwards, the first stage of Visconti’s moment of bfi publishing, London , 2003. involution. It is, in a sense, a sequel to La terra trema and a substitute for those episodes of that film which Visconti still Luchino Visconti belongs, with Welles and Resnais, to a regrets never having been able to make. But in the years that select company of major directors whose international reputation elapsed between the two films Visconti, like Italy itself, had was established early in their careers and has been maintained, moved on. The subject proposed for the new film was too on the basis of a relatively small output, ever since. Among his unwieldy for it to be possible to combine a compact narrative Italian contemporaries he is unique. Unlike Antonioni or Fellini with documentary (or anthropological) treatment. No one could he did not have to wait for recognition. Unlike Rossellini he has have backed such a project if it had been put forward. In any case never been a prolific director, and has managed to concentrate Visconti had no intention of being caught again in the trap of his energies over a quarter of a century on fewer than a dozen documentarism. From the moment of the film’s inception, the meticulously prepared productions. Unlike De Sica he has not complexity of its subject was reflected in a complexity of degenerated as an artist with the decline of the movement that treatment unparalleled in Visconti’s work. In addition to Suso Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—9

Cecchi D’Amico, Visconti’s regular and constant collaborator on Claudia Cardinale and Annie Girardot as fiancées and mistresses. all his films since Bellisima, a number of other scriptwriters were This distribution reflects to a certain extent no doubt the called in during the many stages of the elaboration of the producer’s insistence on a star line-up. But many of the choices narrative, Though the nucleus of the story was original, the final were clearly Visconti’s, notably Delon in the part of Rocco, and script incorporated moments of literary inspiration ranging from show him continuing the pattern set in Bellisima and Senso of Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann through Verga to the Milanese using actors for their persona as well as for their professional stories of Giovanni Testori. The building up of the story was skill. Renato Salvatori, for example, besides being a very good contributed to by various hands, but the ultimate control at every and incidentally very subtle actor, has exactly the physique and stage rested with Visconti himself, and the final shape of the film facial characteristics to convey the charm and gradual reflects the sum of his artistic experience up to that date—not disintegration of Simone, the second brother. On any grounds, only La terra trema but Ossessione and Bellisima and above all, naturalistic or other, he was an obvious choice. But Delon as Senso. Rocco was less obvious. Quite The lessons inherent in apart from the fact that, like Visconti’s experience make Paxiou and Girardot, he is not themselves felt in two ways: in Italian, which meant that the the construction of a human film would have to be post- drama out of a historical situation, synchronised, Delon is far too and in his choice of actors. fragile physically to be Although its subject sounds like a credible as either as a peasant return to La terra trema (perhaps (which is what he starts as) or as ‘Episodio della Citta), in style a professional boxer (which is and in ideological content Rocco what he becomes). and His Brothers is much more a Visconti’s judgment continuation of Senso, Visconti can, I think, be vindicated in has described his form of cinema as ‘anthropomorphic’. terms of the requirements of his anthropomorphic ideal. He Essentially what this means is that the totality of a historical chooses actors to fit into a role, not to conform to a type or merge situation, both its static form and the process of its evolution, is into an environment. Whereas the neo-realist requirement was crystallised in certain human configurations and in the for someone ideally representative of a type of character drawn development of a human drama. (If this sounds just a from their observation and was best filled in many cases by complicated way of saying a truism, one has only to look at all someone who actually was what they were supposed to represent, the directors with whom this is not the case.) In La terra trema Visconti’s demand is for a more complex figuration. In the first this anthropomorphism is suppressed by the view that Visconti is place his characters are not typical members of a class, but obliged to take of his subject—a geographical location—and the individuals. These individuals, in their relations with other way this view is expressed from the ground up by the film’s characters in the film, then represent something that goes beyond protagonists—the natural inhabitants of Aci Trezza. In La terra their simple individuality. What is required of the actor is to trema the characterization of ‘Ntoni is unique. He is the only incarnate the idea of the character, in both its individual and character whose responses are adequate to extend the film on to supra-individual aspects, and to project it. If a professional the level of a historical consciousness and who provides an technique is needed to interpret a role which is not simply drawn anthropomorphic figuration of the kind Visconti was aiming at. from life, from the director’s point of view he actor’s physical For the rest of the film remains fundamentally a documentary appearance is equally important for the use he can make of it study of a place which is taken to contain within its frontiers an independent of any effort of psychological interpretation on the example of a universal form of social exploitation, and its actor’s part. The choice of Delon is a case in point. He is meant characters do not emerge from their particular and passive roles to look fragile, and it is essential to our understanding of Rocco as elements of the social and economic system. Rocco and His that we should realise this. It is not so much Delon who is Brothers, like Senso, aims to go beyond the limits imposed by a miscast in the role, as Rocco who is miscast in his environment. sociological viewpoint of this type. It is a condensed and Both as a person and for what he represents, Rocco is ill-adapted dramatic highlighting of a particular moment in history. Its to the world in which he lives and incapable of carrying the geographical and social boundaries (Milan in the 1950s; an burden he assumes upon himself. immigrant family) are the result of a tremendous effort of The argument about his casting has further implications. historical concentration. The private events which it narrates To say that the actor incarnates the idea of a character raises the mirror the tensions of a wider historical situation, but only problem of the relation of the sign to the signified over the film indistinctly, through the consciousness of the participants. The as a whole. In a film, where the units of language cannot be drama which then explodes within the family and the subsequent isolated and given specific and unambiguous meanings or tragedy is brought about by the participants themselves, and is an functions, there is always a possibility that the translation into active expression of the contradictions inherent in their images will obscure some intended meanings and create others condition. not originally intended. Intentional and actual do not always Visconti’s choice of actors to express his theme was at coincide. The danger is particularly acute in Visconti’s case first sight disconcerting: the mother of the Parondi family to be because of a peculiarity in his method of work which we first played by Katina Paxinou, who is Greek; Renato Salvatori, Alain noticed in connection with La terra trema. In Rocco and His Delon, Spiros Focas, and Max Cartier as four of her sons plus Brothers, as in La terra trema, he started with a clear intellectual Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—10 conception of what he wanted to say, and then saw those throughout the film, and Ciro’s mainly by a long speech which conception gradually modify itself in response to suggestions that he delivers at the end. However evenly matched they might be on came to him as he worked. In La terra trema the result was paper, translation into mages was bound to disturb the balance. almost a new film. In Rocco and His Brothers the effect is party The scaling down of the positive figure of Ciro had, of enrichment and partly of confusion. Alterations were made to however, begun earlier, during the elaboration of the final script. the script right up to the last minute. Then, during the shooting, Visconti originally envisaged him as a trade union militant, and scenes which had been restrained in intention were developed in clearly representative, from a Socialist viewpoint, of positive a way which belies the original indications in the script. As a class consciousness. In the final script, as in the finished film, he result changes have taken place in the structure of the film which is a more ordinary figure altogether—a lad who goes to night Visconti perhaps did not fully foresee and which he would not school and studies to get technical qualifications and to integrate necessarily recognize as having taken place. himself as a skilled mechanic in the industrial world. The general direction in One last change which these changes work is to should be mentioned in order alter the balance between to complete the picture, and positive and negative character. that is the removal during the Those who gain in stature from editing of an opening sequence the changes at the expense of the dedicated to the mother and set others are Rocco and the mother. in Lucania in Both of them in theory represent before the family’s journey to a backward form of Milan. In the literary stricture consciousness of which the film this had a clear function, which set out to be a critique. But in was to situate the mother very their different ways they both of emphatically in her peasant them achieve in practice a environment and to establish a grandeur and a tragic quality point of reference against which is denied to the others. Ciro, in particular, the next brother which her behaviour in Milan could be understood and after Rocco, is overshadowed. His role, originally intended to be eventually criticized. In the film as it stands the point is not positive and important, is correspondingly reduced and he entirely lost, but there is no doubt that dropping this scene means appears as a shadowy and insignificant character whose main that the socially determined motivations in the figure of the function seems to be to clear up the mess caused by the tragic mother are less clearly brought out than they would have been. struggle of the major figures. Helped by Paxiou’s performance she becomes more autonomous Just how this shift in the balance came about is not easy as a person. Anthropomorphism takes over from sociology, and to analyse. Partly it seems to be due to the acting, and to a in the process the film becomes much more ambivalent than a potential discovered in the figurations when the film was under reading of the script would suggest. This ambivalence is deeply way. The imperious power and enormous egotism conveyed in rooted in the structure of the film, and has led to Rocco and His Katina Paxinou’s performance exceed any indications of the Brothers being interpreted in two apparently contradictory mother’s character given in the script. In one sequence in fashions, as a psychological drama and as a political tract. That it particular, early on in the film, when she is trying to pack her is not, even in intention and still less finally realized, a simple sons off to work shoveling snow off the streets in the early political tract can be demonstrated from the changes that morning, Visconti allows her total histrionic domination of the Visconti made in the film as it proceeded. But the other scene. Her possessiveness and ambition come across as a interpretation is equally fallacious. The political element derived tremendous, loving, and all-embracing dynamism sweeping the from the scenario survives into the film. It does not act as the family onwards towards the justice and success that are its motor of the action, but provides as critical perspective necessary rightful due. That her possessiveness is selfish and tyrannical and to judgment of the drama. her ambition pernicious and misplaced emerges as a mere The story of Rocco and His Brothers unfolds as a series abstract reflection by comparison with the sympathetic power of of episodes, merging into each other, in which each of Rosaria the performance. Parondi’s five sons moves in turn to occupy the centre of the Partly, however, even here, the shift can be seen as a stage. Each brother in a crude sense represents a certain kind of necessary consequence of the translation of an intellectual solution to the problems facing a Southern immigrant in a conception into concrete images. AT an immediate level, on the Northern urban environment. These solutions are not abstractly screen, there is no positive or negative, only real and unreal. The conceived, but evolve dialectically, each in response to the true significance of the mother’s tyrannical behavior has to be contradictions and inadequacies discovered in the last. The film deciphered from a set of loose indications scattered throughout opens with the bewildered arrival of Rosria and four of her sons, the film. There is no doubting her reality, but intuition (or Simone, Rocco, Ciro and Luca, at the Stazione Centrale in Milan. prejudice) alone is not enough to enable one to see, from behind The eldest son, Vincenzo, is already settled in the North and is the performance, just what the mother is doing. For that one engaged to the daughter of another immigrant family. It is in her needs a grasp of the structure, and a structure which is pellucid house that the Parondi find Vincenzo, and their arrival instantly enough in print may not be so when the script is turned into film. spark off a row between the two clans, with Vincenzo easily What particularly unbalances the contrast between Rocco and trapped between his loyalty and submission to his family on the Ciro, in these terms, is that Rocco’s role is defined in action one hand, and his love for Ginetta and his determination to keep Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—11 his independence on the other. Vincenzo has opted for an easy same time, however, Simone’s violence toward Nadia has compromise: a steady if undemanding job and a wife from his penetrated below the defences of Rocco’s ideological non- own community to assist his integration. But Rosaria admits of violence. Though he till refuses to hate his brother openly or to no compromise where the family is concerned. She loses him his admit the ambivalence of his feelings, there is an element of job and drives a wedge between him and the sophisticated, petty- repressed hatred for Simone, as well as of self-sacrifice that now Bourgeois Ginetta, by imposing on him her conception of sexual drives him on in the ring. relations in which the man, her son, should take himself a One evening, when Rocco is fighting, Simone finds woman, if necessary by force. In an attempt to get Ginetta back, Nadia, whom he had brought to live with him in his mother’s flat Vincenzo articulates these ideas to her and is smartly slapped in and who had left after a row with Rosaria, and he takes her out the face as a result. It is a long time before he and Ginetta and into the country. The barrier of communication between them is their respective families are again reconciled. total. In a final attempt to break through to her, he assaults her, Vincenzo’s then desists in horror at his own mediocrity and confusion of violence. She is ice-cold and loyalties does not escape resigned. She wants nothing from Simone. His solution is more him except an end to the misery radical, but again he is limited he has caused her. When he by his roots, both moral and advances toward her with a knife, material, in the immigrant she lifts her arms from her sides world. He assets his in a gesture of crucifixion. He independence of family ties, stabs her once without emotion, though he is prepared to profit then paroxysmically again and from them whenever again. Meanwhile, in parallel convenient. He becomes a montage, Rocco is shown fighting boxer, which is a classic mode for his life against a stronger and of advancement for ambitious fiercer opponent. With his guard members of exploited but emergent ethnic groups. He also starts wide open and blood on his face he seems to be going under, going out with Nadia, a good-time girl who stands in the same then appears to remember himself and what he is supposed to be relation to him as Ginetta does to Vincenzo. Also of immigrant doing there. With a last effort he summons up all the savagery he descent, and also more emancipated intellectually than her man, is capable of feeling and pursues his opponent round the ring and her pursuit of the good life has led her to become a prostitute. knocks him down. While Simone walks away, alone, from Simone too sells his body for financial gain, both by becoming a Nadia’s body, family and friends crowd jubilantly round Rocco boxer and also (an even more pointed parallel) by using his in celebration of his success. sexual attractiveness to seduce a middle-aged woman in order to The contrasts contained in the montage between steal her jewels. Simone’s murder of Nadia and Rocco’s symbolic slaughter of his The trouble that Simone gets into then rebound on to opponent are of various kinds. At the most basic and generalized Rocco. Faced with Simone’s excesses and gradual degradation level there is the counterpointing of two forms of violence. In into criminality, Rocco, who after Simone was his mother’s terms of the relationship between the brothers there is a reference favourite, sees it as his responsibility to hold the family together, to Rocco’s sacrifice of himself to Simone, and the fruitless and and sacrifices himself body and soul not only to Simone and the indeed catastrophic result of this sacrifice. Within Rocco’s own family but to the system that subjugates them. psychological development there is the fact that he has learned to During his military service he encounters Nadia, just hate. There is also in Rocco’s determination an implied contrast released from a spell inside, in one of those Italian provincial with Simone’s own career as a boxer. Simone was very good at towns that seem to exist only for the sake of their barracks and demolishing weaker opponents, but easily collapsed under their prison. He and Nadia fall in love. Simone is both jealous pressure. His response to his predicament with Nadia is in a and offended. As the elder brother he claims proprietary right to sense predicated in his own career as a boxer, both in the fact that Nadia, as his woman. He finds out that Rocco and Nadia are it was in the ring that he acquired the habit of violence, and in his together, and rapes her while two of his friends hold on to Rocco bafflement when faced with a situation which he cannot easily and force him to be a passive and humiliated spectator of what is dominate. Finally, there is in the scene a purely rhythmic going on. Simone then turns against Rocco, who hardly defends parallelism between the two events, the two acts of revenge— himself, and beats him up. Simone’s against Nadia and Rocco’s against his destiny of When he has recovered, Rocco finds Nadia again and sacrifice—which are both equally tragic and absurd, and which tells her that he can’t be with her any more and that she should achieve their climax at the same time. go back to Simone. This perverse act of self-sacrifice, which The tragic destinies of Simone and Rocco effectively Rocco makes as they stand together on the pinnacled roof of end here, with this sequence, which is the dramatic high-point of Milan Cathedral, leads also to Nadia’s destruction. Simone is the film. The next phase belongs to Ciro. Simone appears, heavily in debt, and to rescue him Rocco sells himself to the bloodstained, at the family party where Rocco’s victory is being boxing promoter on a long-term contract. Rocco is celebrated. Rocco and the mother, for Simone’s sake and that of fundamentally incapable of hatred, either towards his brother or the family, take him in and prepare to shield him. But Ciro towards his opponents. For his brother’s sake he learns to be a escapes from the party and denounces Simone to the police. For a boxer and to overcome his natural gentleness in the ring. At the long time he has watched with dismay the narrow loyalties and Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—12 extreme solidarity of the family group. Now the time has come elsewhere, in the outside world. His denunciation of Simone when he finds himself obliged to act, and does so ruthlessly , brings the two worlds together. Over and above his role in the opening up the family sanctum to the cold winds of external family structure he represents a new social type altogether. He is justice. In a final sequence Ciro explains to Luca, the youngest the first of the brothers to integrate successfully into Northern brother, what he has done and why he did it. Luca is still a child, society. His conceptions are those of a Northern industrial and his horizons are bounded by the family. Unlike the others he worker and no longer those inherited from his peasant family. It remembers the South only vaguely, but he has the idea that he is in accordance with these conceptions that he is able to would like some day to go back, to renew contact with the world denounce his brother, and in so doing save the family from itself. of his origins. Ciro has no such nostalgia. He has fought hard to For what destroys the family is not Ciro’s action but its liberate himself from the burden of being a Southerner, and has own extraordinary internal loyalties and the contradiction no intention of sacrificing his hard-won gains: his Milanese between these and the society in which it finds itself. Rosaria, girlfriend, his skilled job at Alfa Rocco, and Simone are all victims of a Romeo. By betraying his family he conception of the family which has no has broken the last remaining tie with relevance whatever to an industrial society. the past. Luca, who is so much Rosaria has a moral code in terms which younger, will be able to enjoy the Ciro is guilty of a gross betrayal, in luxury of rediscovering his roots; comparison with which Simone’s crime is Ciro cannot. of no significance. Rocco’s appreciation of The final dialogue the situation is similar to his mother’s, but completes the process whereby the is couched in more individualist and initiative is passed from one brother religious terms. His feeling toward Simone to the next and we are given an is of personal as well as family loyalty. If insight into the problem facing each he gives up Nadia to Simone partly because one and the way each reacts against Simone has a right to her decreed by the last and carries on from where his elder brother left off. But custom, it is also because his whole ideology is one of sacrifice. by the time we reach the end the procedure has become summary He loves Simone and will do anything for him. He refuses to and intellectualized. Ciro and Luca, compared with Simone and denounce him to ‘the justice of men’, and his own conception of Rocco, are mere symbols. They articulate (Luca childishly, Ciro justice involves taking upon himself, Christ-like, the burden of in a more adult fashion) their own consciousness of who they are all the sins of the world. As Ciro points out, Rocco is a saint, and and what they have to do. The story ends with them, as a his saintliness is as irrelevant and as disastrous as Rosaria’s formality; the drama has already ended. belief in the family and Simone’s criminality. It would be true to say, however, that the continuity The criminal Simone is in many ways the most from Simone to Rocco to Ciro to Luca is a a hangover from the interesting character of all. He has two assets to help him escape literary structure with which Visconti started. The significance of his sub-proletarian destiny, his sexual charm and his strength, the changes in the shape of the film which we analysed above and he uses them to the full. When they run out he has nothing lies here, in the qualitative difference they created between else to rely on. He tries to have things all ways, to enjoy Nadia Rosaria, Simone, and Rocco on the one hand, and Ciro and Luca for what she is and to possess her as of right in accordance with on the other. The tragedy of destruction involves the first three his primitive masculinist ideas. What he lacks is knowledge of only. Ciro and Luca are not participants, and they survive to his own limits, and the capacity to gauge the extent of his assimilate the lesson of the past and carry on into the future. corruption and the precarious nature of his conquests. Ciro’s Luca is a pure symbol, representing the future, and judgment of him, as a source of corruption poisoning the whole comparable, in Visconti’s work, to the child that ‘Ntoni talks to nest of the family, is unduly harsh. He is permanently childlike. at the end of La terra trema. Ciro is more complex. Like Pietro He is accustomed to getting all he can have, and in a world where in Vaghe stele dell’Orsa, he is an inheritor. What gives him his there is so much more to be got he wants all that as well. freedom is the destruction of the family. But unlike Pietro he is The source of corruption, in so far a it can be made also a member of the family and is responsible for consummating particular, is Nadia. She has a much clearer idea than does its destruction when he denounces Simone to the police. Up to Simone of the limits of what she can expect, and unlike Simone that moment, however, his role in the drama had been she is completely emancipated from traditional concepts of insignificant., and even the act of denunciation falls outside the sexual morality. To her Simone is a man of a certain type, with family drama proper. He is also unlike the other members of the whom she can have a certain kind of relationship, and Rocco is family in that from the outset he manages to go his own way. He another, To Simone, however, Nadia can only be a prostitute or a is determined to carve himself out a future in his new wife. When she refuses to be either he breaks down completely. environment, and involves himself as little as possible in family Until it is too late she miscalculates the strength of his passion affairs. Whereas Rocco takes up the burden of Simone’s sins on and the extent to which he olds her responsible for his failure. the family’s behalf, Ciro feels no such obligstions. All he gets With Rocco she hopes to find a man who makes no claims for from the family is a roof over his head and a knowledge of what possession and to whom she does not prostitute herself either, not to be, and how to avoid the disaster that is in store. and again she miscalculates, not because of anything in Rocco as In relation to the family, therefore, Ciro’s role is that of a person but because of his relationship with Simone. Neither a detached consciousness. The life he participates in is msn is in a position to supply what she is looking for. Visconti—ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERSL—13

Rocco and His Brothers is not an scenarios, not only in the case of Rocco and His entirely satisfactory film. It is really two films Brothers, show up the dichotomy clearly. On the in one, an epic and a drama. The epic level of intentions all Visconti’s historical films— concerns the journey of the Parondi family to La terra trema. Senso, Rocco and His Brothers, the North of Italy, its gradual conquest of a The Leopard, and Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa—can be new future in its new environment, and the read as an illustration of a conception of history in liberation of Ciro from Rosaria. The drama is which change is both welcome and inevitable. But the story of the triangle Simone-Nadia- in the final realization nostalgia prevails over Rocco, of Rocco’s self-sacrifice and progress. The individual—Franz, Rocco, the Simone’s murder of Nadia. As heroes, Rocco Prince, Gianni—rises to confront history and to be and Ciro are in no way comparable. They tragically defeated. Only in two films is this stand for the two different ways in which the pattern contradicted. In La terra trema the film has been interpreted, the drama and the defeated individual, ‘Ntoni, is also the tract. Rocco’s crises, his suffering and representative of progress and historical advance. sacrifice, make him a tragic and dramatic In White Nights nostalgia, in the person of Natalia , figure who engages our sympathies at an comes out triumphant. These two films are emotional level. But once the drama has run limiting cases of a conception of the world which its course the more intellectual vision is consistent in its opposition of two conflicting reasserts itself. Ciro, who as a character is insignificant but ideals, one rooted emotionally in the past, and the other whose historical role is far more important, emerges to put projected intellectually into the future. If we have chosen to Rocco’s tragedy into perspective. The two do not contradict each finish on a study of Rocco and His Brothers, it is because it is other. Rocco’s tragedy is no less real for being forced on him by here that the particular conflict, which is the problematic centre a conception of the world which is subsequently criticized. But of all Visconti’s work, is most explicitly expressed. nor does it annul the criticism. The sources of the conflict could be, and indeed have To a certain extent, as we have seen, the central been, traced to the anomaly of Visconti’s position as both as ambiguity is allowed for in the construction of the film. The epic aristocrat, living off a past heritage, and a Marxist and a and the drama overlap and are deliberately counterpointed. The Communist, committed to a belief in the Socialist future. But the individual and the historical are set up in conflict with each other, question is not one of giving an explanation, in any case and the outcome of the conflict is that the individual is defeated. inadequate, of why the conflict should exist. It is more important But it is not possible to see either the conflict or its resolution as to trace, within the films, the way the conflict is expressed and, if directly representative of Visconti’s conscious intentions. The possible, resolved. As I have tried to show, the structure of ambiguity does not lie simply in the problem that is posed, and Visconti’s films is complex and often equivocal. Above all, the left unanswered, in Rocco and His Brothers. It strikes deeper and films are works of art. They reveal the world in a particular reflects s constant tension in Visconti’s work between an guise, not, perhaps, how it is in an objective sense, not, for that intellectual belief in the cause of progress and an emotional matter, necessarily how we would like it to be; but how it can be nostalgia for the past world that is being destroyed. A perceived and experienced by a particular individual at a comparison between the finished films and their original particular time.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2017 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXXV

September 26: Jacques Demy The Umbrellas of Cherbourg 1964 October 3: M*A*S*H 1970 October 10 Alan J. Pakula All The President’s Men 1976 October 17: Andrei Tarkovsky Nostalghia 1983 October 24: Wings of Desire 1987 October 31: Mike Nichols Postcards from the Edge 1990 November 7: Tran Anh Hung The Scent of Green Papayas 1993 November 14: Hayeo Miyazaki The Wind Rises 2013 November 21: Andrey Zvyagintsev Leviathan 2014 November 28: Pedro Almodóvar Julieta 2016 December 5: Some Like it Hot 1959

CONTACTS:...email Diane Christian: [email protected]…email Bruce Jackson [email protected] the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto [email protected] cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/ The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.